This article describes how to setup a new emulator which allows to install apps which use Google Play Services.

Recently, Android 4.3 (API level 18) has been published. As former releases it contains system images for ARM and Intel Atom (x86). When creating an emulator via the Android Virtual Device Manager one can choose to target either the “plain” API level or include Google APIs. The “plain” configuration can benefit from both hardware acceleration options (ARM and Intel Atom). Running such a virtual device is quite comfortable as it behaves similar to a hardware device. The Google API targets however do not allow to use Intel Atom architecture.

After a lot of research, trial and error I finally understood how I can specify four different button states via XML. The important detail is that you need to add both state parameters in every item. In the following example those are android:state_checked and android:state_pressed which can be combined to four different states.

Sometimes it is useful to copy a series of commit to another branch. This post describes how to do this using git rebase. Two example illustrate different scenarios which should help to understand the command arguments in generell.

Example 1: The commit P, Q, R which are contained in branch feature should be copied to branch master. The commits should be appended to commit M.

The first command git rebase --onto M O R copies the commits P, Q, R to the branch master. They won’t be visible if you check the visual graph in gitk. This is because there is no branch reference that points to one of the three commits. To update the branch master run the second command git rebase HEAD master which moves up the HEAD to commit R.

Sadly Eclipse ships with a broken color theme when it comes to autocompletion and tooltips. I cannot tell if the problem is limited to Ubuntu Precise, however, it is worth getting fixed immediately. The following screenshots illustrate the broken color settings in both situations. The tooltip window shows up with a black background color and blue links.

Eclipse – Tooltip with default colors settings

When autocompletion popup appears the first suggestions is not readable at all.

Today, I tried to find a convenient way to unify the spelling of a word used in various text files spread across multiple directories. Of course vim has a solution to this. In my case all files are of type *.txt. The term I want to search for is “re-use” which should be replaced by “reuse“. Here is what I did:

Open vim while loading all relevant files recursively as a argument list the editor. vim **/*.txt

Start recording a macro in register “a”. Type qa

Enter the substitution command to search and replace a specific character pattern :%s/re\-use/reuse/ge

Reading todays post-hook emails with the latest diffs of some project the thought rushed to my head that it would be nice to have the diffs displayed in color. Since I am using Thunderbird as my email client I found a great add-on named “Colored Diff”.

Although, the add-on seems to be outdated to work with the latest Thunderbird version (which is 10.0 right now) there is an easy way to install the add-on while the automatic installer refuses to do so. Here is what you can do to make the installation work.

Once in a while one forgets to configure the user name and email address for git when initializing or cloning a new git repository. So do I. But git would not be git if it does not have an answer to that problem. Here is what git prints out when you commit without previously configuring the user credentials.